DENVER — Jamila Spencer recalls the somewhat silly scene at the special session of the women's-studies course.

“Can you wear pink clothes and be a feminist?” a student asked the two young feminist authors making their presentation. “Can you have a boyfriend or husband if you're a feminist?”

The two authors were Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards, who co-wrote the best-selling modern feminist “bible,” Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism and the Future. They answered Yes to every question from the gathering of 300 young feminists jammed into a University of Colorado classroom — until a young woman raised her hand to ask if she could be a feminist and defend the rights of the unborn.

“No,” the authors told the students, marking the afternoon's sole departure from the “anything goes” mantra that defines Gen-Y feminism.

Spencer begs to differ. She works full time as a feminist educator/lobbyist and is totally against the killing of unborn children.

Meet the women of Endow — Educating on the Nature and Dignity of Women — a Catholic feminist apostolate based in Denver. Spencer is a program coordinator for the organization.

Feminine Genius

Mainstream feminists seem to fear and loathe the Catholic feminist apostolate.

“The idea of women who pay homage to the teachings of this Pope [John Paul II] and then call themselves ‘feminists’ is patently absurd,” said Regina Cowles, president of the Boulder, Colo., chapter of the National Organization for Women and past president of NOW-Colorado. “Pope John Paul II is the last person on planet Earth who should be talking about the role of women in society because nobody could be less qualified than he is.”

Cowles describes herself as a “recovering Catholic,” the offspring of “hypocritical” Italian immigrant Catholics who she said secretly used contraception. She said her opposition to Catholic theology inspired her to a life of feminist activism.

“The basic tenet of feminism is that a woman is not equal to a man if she does not have equal control over her destiny,” Cowles said. “In order for her to have equal control over her body she must have access to abortion and contraception, which the Pope is against. These people are not feminists and they're merely co-opting the term.”

Spencer fires back that real feminists are women who value the natural biological function of a woman's body rather than treating female fertility as a disease that must be cured in order for women to be more like men.

“Abortion and contraception are the ultimate masculinization of women,” Spencer said. “It sounds like [Cowles] is saying that if we don't take a pill each day — a pill that makes us more biologically similar to men — then we have a disease that we're choosing not to cure. She's saying women need to be more like men, and that doesn't free us.”

Spencer said Endow values much of what the mainstream feminist movement has stood for in recent decades: more opportunity for women in the workplace, better wages for working women, better educational opportunities for women and a whole slate of new options.

“But we also believe in affirming the nature of what it means to be a woman, and some feminists are working hard to abolish the role of motherhood,” Spencer said. “They say that men are not burdened with motherhood so women shouldn't be, either, in order that they can excel in the working world.

“Rather than advocating that women be more like men, in order that they can compete in the working world, we advocate that the working world become better in order to accommodate women. … We can either oppress women so that they fit into the man's working world or we can insist that the working world do more for women in order to gain the advantage of feminine genius.”

Pope's Influence

Endow co-founder and executive director Terry Polakovic said she was inspired to establish the apostolate after reading and hearing about John Paul's messages about women that are found in a variety of letters and in his theology of the body.

“Necessary emphasis should be placed on the genius of women, wrote the Pope in his 1995 Letter to Women, “not only by considering great and famous women of the past or present, but also those ordinary women who reveal the gift of their womanhood by placing themselves at the service of others in their everyday lives. For in giving themselves to others each day women fulfill their deepest vocation. Perhaps more than men, women acknowledge the person, because they see persons with their hearts. They see them independently of various ideological or political systems. They see others in their greatness and limitations; they try to go out to them and help them. In this way the basic plan of the Creator takes flesh in the history of humanity and there is constantly revealed, in the variety of vocations, that beauty — not merely physical, but above all spiritual — which God bestowed from the very beginning on all, and in a particular way on women.”

“The Pope's writings are about understanding who you are as a woman and bringing that to its full, wherever you are,” Polakovic said. “He says that women need to be encouraged and free to be who they are, whether in the boardroom or at home.”

Endow board member Ginger Giesen, a Methodist convert to Catholicism, said she, too, was inspired to work as a feminist after learning about the Pope's philosophy of womanhood. Like Polakovic, Giesen was a working mother who thought society was driving her to be more like a man if she was to be valued in any aspect of her life.

“Society was telling me that motherhood was fine so long as it didn't affect my ability to earn money, my ability to act emotionally and intellectually like a man and my ability to converse more like a man in public settings,” Giesen said. “The Pope says go ahead and have a career but bring your feminine genius to the job. Don't devalue the strength and grace that's required to be a mother, because society needs that.”

Spencer said Endow's focus is to educate women on living womanhood to its fullest. The organization serves as a resource center for educational programs, retreats and conferences and offers a “feminine genius” program and other educational seminars to Catholic schools and colleges.

Though it rents office space at the Archdiocese's pastoral center, it is not an entity of the archdiocese. It has two full-time staffers, 30 volunteers and 70 people enrolled in study groups.

Polakovic said the Pope's message about a “new feminism” has resonated with women in a dramatic way and is catching on quickly.

Though NOW's Cowles believes the message will “never catch on with anyone,” Archbishop Charles Chaput of Denver is optimistic.

“What makes Endow so effective is the women who created it,” he said. “They're intelligent, they're very dedicated, and they're thoroughly feminine in the deepest Catholic sense. When you live with Mary and Edith Stein and Dorothy Day as your role models, there's not a lot you can't accomplish.”

Wayne Laugesen writes from Boulder, Colorado.